Notebook Page: Addendum- a thing added or to be added, ca. 1968. Eva Hesse.
Dear People,
If you are 'my people' you will know exactly what I mean, and maybe you don't even need to read this letter, but, if you are anyone else, you will want to hop into my Black Sedan, and let me tell you about the things I have been reading. It is all memoir and auto fiction for me at this location in the mapping of my present via a fitful and clumsy reviewing of my past (revisionist history?). Okay, you can call it the same old existential crisis, but I think maybe it is just living. In any case, I am waiting for the leaves to fall, like I do, and I am reading all these great women writing their experience of living. The thing that is so wonderful is that it feels like home; like a mirror; like this mirror.
Maybe all we can ever have is reflections, but these images feel close to what I think could be true. Jenny Erpenbeck says "...we want to write because we find it hard to make ourselves understood. Because we find that things fall by the wayside when we speak." Sing it, sister! My wayside is littered with the things I meant to say and the questions I wanted to ask. Like this one: What, then, do I do instead of trying to get people to like me? Or this one; Why did you keep on giving me all that false hope?
Claire Dederer writes that you find yourself "...flying the flag of idleness and melancholy. You find yourself not just wanting to do nothing but somehow needing to do nothing. Maybe a woman's version of a midlife crisis involves stopping doing stuff?" And haven't we said things that amount to this to each other nearly every time we meet? Déjà vu!*
Which, because I am reading also Biography of X, brings me to the notion of conviction in making art. I have often found intention to matter, to be required for making art, but I am ready to let conviction be the one that got away. I wish someone had told me it was fine to let ambivalence be my muse, but, let's not cry over that spilled milk, let us instead assert that ambivalence is just the ticket for art making, and even for living. My years of desperately seeking conviction should not be your story; maybe you will want to tell a story that goes like this:
One fine Spring day I set out to make my way in the world, and I met many strange and wonderful beings along the way, and I hoped they would like me, but I also knew it was okay if they didn't. I could give them things, little trinkets I found, an acorn cap, or a stone, and it was only just that: a giving that neither made or unmade me; their acquisition was not my diminishment. The little things they might give me, magic passwords and permissions, well I was free to use them as long as I liked, but also free to discard them if they began to feel confining. The continuing exchange of ideas and words and deeds was the main thing, the quest was just sort of there so if any dolts should ask you what you were doing, you could answer that you were seeking the fair princess imprisoned in her turret.
* Olivia Rodrigo is another of the real, non-animated Disney Princesses, like Annette Funicello, Selena Gomez, Zendaya, Demi Levato, Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, etc.
Notes: Erpenbeck, Jenny. Not a Novel- A Memoir in Pieces, New Directions, New York, page 143. Dederer, Claire, Love and Trouble- A Midlife Reckoning, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, page 9.
